It's hard to believe the end of this course I've been working on, reading about and thinking about non-stop for months is almost over. I still feel like I should be writing some kind of term paper but I feel that I really showed my learning in other ways thoroughly regardless of the lack of papers.
Anyway...I want to wrap this up in a blog post. I loved the book Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit by Marie Battiste. A couple of days ago I was re reading some of her writing and came across page 126 & 127 where she is talking about power relationships and the links that has to what we teach in schools and how we teach it. My own personal research melded so well with her book, it almost seemed serendipitous that I had been reading about unschooling right before I took this course. Schooling as it is now must change. I cannot see any way around it. I recently have been taking courses that will lead to an administrative role in a school but i am beginning to wonder if that's where I want to be. I wonder how I can continue with this school system, feeling good about 'tweaking' it when it really needs a complete and utter overhaul. Yesterday I read a book by a guy I follow on Twitter, Seth Godin. He wrote an e-book called "Stop Killing Dreams" If you want to read it, it's here: http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/stopstealingdreamsscreen.pdf. His book says what Marie says, although in different language and with different reasons. Schools must change. They are hurting people. They are furthering the status quo and giving nothing back. He talks more about the factory style schooling that helped people become better factory workers that isn't really serving anyone anymore. Although I wonder...I wonder if it is serving people after all. It is definitely making us less inquisitive, more compliant consumers. When the government says something crazy, a few people will protest but most people have learned that they are helpless and can't effect change at all so they say nothing. If that's true, then what are any of us doing in education? Why are we perpetuating poverty and mindless consumerism/debt imprisonment when we are, as Godin says, on a downward spiral as a society as a result of it? It concerns me greatly. I'm not sure what I will do from here. I want to learn more about it before I leap out of education entirely. I still hold a small amount of hope that if enough of us feel this way, that we can wait until the idea starts building critical mass and then we will be able to change things. I want to end this on a more positive note. I loved the format of this course...allowing me to express my ideas in such a free way. I felt it led to way more learning for me personally, although it was hard to find direction at times. I have modeled my grade 12 social studies assessment model after this idea in this semester. It isnt going as well there but I have high hopes that they will pull it together at the end (as I did). I felt free near the end of the course...free in a way one rarely feels in an academic setting. I had spent a few weeks feeling guilty about reading Gatto instead of Daniel Paul's book (which I finished anyway) but it turns out that the ideas in Gatto's book led me to other ones that actually applied to the course material. So in the end, everything came together well in my mind. I have learned a lot in this course. And it has inspired me to learn even more about this subject as I move forward in understanding the critical issues in education that we face in the 21st century. Thank you for reading.
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I just made a PechaKucha last night about different forms of schooling. First let me say, I had no idea it was that difficult to record audio. Especially if you want it to be perfect. Even then, some of the audio was flawed.
In my discovery of the issues and problems with schooling, I went on a search for different forms. It started with Marie Battiste's book "Decolonizing Education" and her mention of the Maori and schooling. It got me thinking about the paper I wrote about the Inuit and how they are trying to do some of the same things that the Maori did because it was so effective. Since it's a fairly new thing in the Arctic, a lot of work remains but I have high hopes they will succeed. They have already succeeded in making sure that their language is respected and some of their culture leaks into the school system. However, being a teacher up there taught me that euro-centrism is alive and well in the administrations and teaching staff and that will be very difficult to fix if more Inuit people do not become teachers. A lot of the admin and teachers I worked with in each school tried to replicate southern schools. I mean, of course they did...that's all we knew. A very few had managed to balance the two but none were able to fully embrace the Inuit culture in the schools and do things in ways that the Inuit would do. It might have been the curriculum and it may have been the class sizes. In a school in southern BC on a reservation, I was a science teacher. One of the women healers asked me to research ethnobotany and help her incorporate it into the school science program to build respect for her craft. So I did. Apparently I was the first science teacher that recognized ethnobotany as 'real science'. I stay convinced that if schooling is to really serve people: any people, that we are going to have to change how to do things. Some are already doing it. Sudbury schooling in the USA, the Inuit initiatives in the far north that will ensure the survival of their language and respect for their way of life, the Maori, multiple small schools across Canada on reserves and off that are trying new forms of schooling in order to truly serve people, truly teach them useful things. I wonder sometimes if we need to move away from curriculum based learning and into something more organic and holistic. I certainly would send my son to a school like that because I don't think the way they teach in elementary schools serves a lot of the children there. I know that in my own classrooms it is very difficult to do anything but to teach to the middle. The ones that are too fast, too smart, too interested or lacking in those things are difficult in classrooms where there are 30 students. Maybe I haven't mastered the 'differentiation' that is seen as the way to fix these issues (that rarely works, in my experience). I have enjoyed this course (it's almost over). I enjoyed the freedom to research what I was interested in and incorporate it into my learning from the course work. At the beginning of the course I was feeling guilty about reading Gatto, Holt and Illich because I felt I should be reading other things, works that were required by the course work. I read those too eventually but while reading Marie Battiste's book I realized that it fit really well. That taking the ideas from the unschooling sector made me question everything, not take any part of the schooling experience for granted and this created a mindset that made me want to reach out to other ways of schooling children. I'm not entirely convinced that schooling is necessary for education (Gatto is a very compelling writer). But I have since met many, many people both aboriginal and non aboriginal that believes schooling is necessary for life. At a parent teacher interview the other day, a parent explained why she wanted her daughter to 'get an education' at school and it was because in her job, she has been barred from rising higher because she didn't get her high-school diploma. So even though I question schooling, I see that other people think it's necessary and I could very well be thinking from a middle class bias. It's easy to question the status quo when you have a higher education yourself, isn't it? Anyway, back to the point: I have enjoyed this course. I feel like I learned a mountain of information in a very short time. I have also taken the methods of evaluation and assessment and incorporated into my own courses. They are having the same struggles as I did at first and now know that the assessment method is a learning curve itself. In short, Thank you Evie for teaching me so much. Cheers, Golda I recently watched a film called "Reel Injun" and thought it was interesting. There has been more public dialogue in the last few years about using stereotypical images to define First Nations people in our country. This has included ideas about Halloween costumes (The "I am not a costume" movement) as well as discussions about the sports teams using stereotypical images and team names that are based on a Nation's culture. I have friends on my social media accounts that agree and ones that don't. One friend thought it was honouring her culture to dress like her during Halloween and others that are offended so I became aware that the discussion was not simply a black and white answer, "Don't wear costumes are use names that are based on another's culture because it's rude" because some people feel that it is helping promote awareness of their culture.
I think Thomas King hit the nail on the head when he wrote "I'm not the Indian you had in mind." He makes sure we understood that he does not want to be and is not a stereotype. He wanted people to question the stereotypical Indian because things have changed and no one is so simplistic. Upon reading that, I thought of the times I have heard people questioning the use of snowmobiles for the Inuit because they like the image of dogsleds, for example. When reading his article I had to admit that I, too, had prejudicial expectations of certain things. For example, when being taught how to make beaded bracelets for Sto:lo days, I had a thought pop into my head about how it wasn't 'really' the traditional culture because plastic beads were probably a newish invention. After reading Thomas King's ideas about this, I realized how arrogant that was. It's arrogant, also, to talk about dogsleds as the 'only' way to be Inuit based on an archaic view of what Inuit means. And how dare we even question what other people do and how they evolve both as individuals and as a culture! Anyway, I originally wrote this because of the film "Reel Injun". I feel that movie had these same ideas present. However, it struck me as particularly sad that a young First Nations person may not realize he was the "Indian" in the cowboys and Indian movies and that the Indians always lost in those movies, outsmarted by the cowboys (even though the cowboys were often bad at everything else). What an awful realization it must have been. Just to be clear, I didn't find it sad that he didn't realize that he was an "Indian" but that he didn't even recognize what they were really saying until later. What an awful image we were creating about them! I think some of those ideas took hold of our culture and exist still today. It's likely one of the reasons that some people think the First Nations people are so homogenous, even though there are so many nations that are so different from each other. I live in Alberta right now and as I teach social studies (which a more-than-usual dose of FNMI culture in the course), I have to make sure that the students understand that the Cree are different from the FN in BC, who are different than the northern groups, who are very different than the matriarchal peoples who inhabited the Great Lakes region, who are different than the east coast peoples, etc. The movie was very interesting. If you have a chance to watch "Reel Injun" and want to challenge your own stereotypes, do it! I recently introduced my class to Thomas King's "Truth about stories" Massey lectures after they read an excerpt from his book, "Truth and Bright Water". At the same time, in another class, we are talking about ideology and where they come from, who creates them, and how we are influenced by them. Thomas King always is an entertaining and engaging speaker and writer and I always enjoy introducing his ideas to my classes. What I take from those lectures is that we create our own reality with stories. Stories is all we really are. Which stories do we tell ourselves in order to construct meaning and understand our world? religions are stories, history is a story (something I've known for a long time). I asked my ideology class what stories the colonists told themselves in order to justify genocide of the First Nations people they met. I don't really know the answer to that question but it's an interesting one.
I was listening to a podcast yesterday, "Unlearn and Rewild" where Buffy Ste. Marie said that if we tell ourselves that they committed genocide because of racism, we are missing a big chunk of the real reason. Buffy said that they did it and are still doing it because of colonialism and every person who is acting in this spirit of colonialism feels helpless to change the path of what is happening. I thought that was a really important insight. I say that because even though I know as a teacher that the way we are teaching in schools is harming students, especially First Nations and Metis students in my school, I continue. And it's driving me crazy! I've seriously considered giving up education entirely and focus my attention on really helping people. The problem is, that even though the arguments of unschooling and deschooling education are compelling, I really think there might be a chance to change things for the better. How will things change, though, if the people who see the need for change and see what needs to be changed, leave? Maybe someday I will come to believe what Gatto and others like him believe and will give up and leave for other things. However, I don't want to give up so easily just yet. If we see what needs to be changed and the system makes it difficult to change, what is it about that story that we could start retelling? I think Thomas King is right, that we are a collection of stories and the stories we choose to tell define who we are. There are thousands of self-help books out there (Tony Robbins, Bob Doyle, Rhonda Byrne, to name a few) that espouse the same idea: that to change your story can potentially change your life. However, what do you do when you are a victim of someone else's ideology? If your story was changed because of the actions of another, like in the case of a cultural genocide? I don't actually have the answer to that question but I would like to find some strategies that are helpful. I was at a teacher's convention here in Alberta this week and one of the speakers talked about the 94 recommendations of the truth and reconciliation committee and suggested that might be a good place to start. One of those recommendations is education of the general population about the truth about what has been done and what continues to be done. The speaker that came to my class also said that: that all he personally wanted is a chance to tell his story and to make sure the story was passed on to future Canadians so that the truth was known and the past could be laid to rest. I hope we are at a great junction where the stories will start to change. I hope that the work and the lives of all these people that are trying to sooth the past wounds will come to fruition. I feel like my story is part of a greater awakening and I hope that more people see the truth, whatever that might be. I know my story is intertwined with these stories now forever because once you see or hear a story, you cannot forget. |
AuthorMasters in Education student at the University of New Brunswick, I am avidly interested in the future of education, especially for First Nation, Metis and Inuit students in Canada. I believe change is going to come from these sectors who have the most room for growth and the most interest in seeing the status quo changed. Archives
March 2016
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